


A casual paragraph

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Drugs, Gen, Journalism, POV Outsider, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-13 14:15:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7979695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A journalist investigating a minor scandal surrounding an MP's son uncovers a lot more than she bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A casual paragraph

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [antonia_forest_fanworks_2016](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/antonia_forest_fanworks_2016) collection. 



> Prompt:
> 
> "One always has to reckon with the 'no smoke without fire' piece."
> 
> A daily rag publishes a column-filler about how the suggestion that P. Merrick, only son of A. Merrick, MP, cheated in his O-level exams is firmly denied, but certain irregularities have taken place which are still being investigated, and sources have confirmed that P. Merrick has unexpectedly left in mid-year the prestigious X boarding school where fees are £Y per term, &c.
> 
> How do Patrick and his parents respond?  
> Is Claudie still around and how does she react to them?  
> How do Anthony Merrick's MP friends and foes react?

Mattie dropped her biro on the scruffy spider diagram in her notebook and slumped back in her chair, staring at the mildewed ceiling tiles of the _Chronicle_ ’s newsroom. A discreditably timid and lazy part of her wished she’d written the couple of column inches of insinuation which, at first, it seemed, were all the story warranted:

> Amid the regularly scheduled chaos of the autumn O-level sittings, it has come to light that the son of Anthony Merrick, Conservative MP for Westbridge East, may be at the centre of the controversy surrounding two apparently linked compromises of examination security. The Southern Examination Board is continuing to investigate an alleged breach of protocol in two examination centres, including the Cardinal Newman Memorial School in Mayfair. Known as the Newman, the prestigious Roman Catholic day school for boys charges fees of over £2000 p.a. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Newman, where Mr Merrick’s son has been a pupil for two years, said that he had no comment to make on the O-level irregularities, but he could confirm that a fifth-form boy had been withdrawn from the school in accordance with the wishes of his parents… 

  
But she simply couldn’t leave it there. Not after what Mrs Harman had said the other day.

Mattie had taken her mother for an early dinner in a little trat on Floral Street, an unspoken apology for not having seen her in nearly a month, though they lived only a hour’s Tube and bus journey apart. A petite woman, very stylish if rather self-consciously well-preserved in her russet-coloured trouser-suit, approached them on her way out, expressing effusive thanks for a concert ticket.

‘Not in the slightest, I was so glad you could make use of it—do you remember Mrs Harman, dear? Jane, this is my daughter Matilda—’ 

Smiles and nods were exchanged. 

‘Well, it was a revelation to me: I don’t think I’d ever really _heard_ Tippett before—oh, and you’ll never guess who I ran across—’ 

‘Mm?’ 

‘Helena Merrick. I hadn’t seen her in _months_ , though I bump into Anthony a fair bit, naturally.’ 

Mattie sipped coffee, hoping her flicker of interest had gone unnoticed. 

‘I suppose she’s quite often immured in Dorset—or is it Devon? Was it her son who was paralysed in a fall, or am I thinking of—?’ 

‘Patrick? I believe he did have a climbing accident a couple of years ago, but he’s fully recovered now. In fact, he was with his mother that night—’ 

Arranging her face into an attitude of polite boredom, Mattie reflected that she really must treat Mummy more often. In her bridge-gardening-and-tennis way, she knew _everyone_. 

‘Such a striking little boy. Those _eyes_. Very charming, if a trifle precocious—but that was eight or nine years ago. I've lost touch with the Merricks entirely: there was a rather unfortunate misunderstanding which never got cleared up—’ 

( _Bugger._ ) 

‘I’m afraid the striking little boy has become a rather sullen young man. The awkward age, of course, but from all one _hears_ , his is more than usually refractory. He’s at the Newman, in the form that had the bother with their O-levels, and Anthony had to take him out—for something quite unrelated, I hasten to add—I shan’t bore you with shoptalk about the post-conciliar changes in our Church, of course, but Anthony has taken up an unfortunately retrograde stance. With his usual geniality, of course, but Patrick’s followed his father with all the tolerance and good humour of sixteen.’ 

‘Well, better that than drugs and joyriding, maybe—’ 

Mrs Harman twitched her head from side to side, then froze, quivering, like a budgie sensing a hostile feline presence. ‘What on earth do you mean by—’ 

‘Oh my dear, nothing, of course. Though sometimes even well-bred boys—’ 

‘Oh, I see. I am sorry. It just made me start, because Patrick _was_ in a serious car smash, last spring half-term; he had a perfectly miraculous escape, and was quite unhurt. I wondered if people had been spreading wild rumours—’ Mrs Harman clamped her jaw shut and gripped the edge of the table. Forgetting her professional interest for a moment, Mattie looked up at her in concern, but Mrs Harman’s beady dark eyes skittered wildly, refusing to meet her gaze. Stagily, she consulted her watch. ‘Goodness,’ she said, apparently dispersing some small obstruction in her throat. ‘I’m running dreadfully late—delightful to see you, Evelyn—Matilda.’ 

She raised her hand in skittish benediction, turned and almost scampered for the door. Mattie was inconsequentially reminded of a favourite episode in one of her easy teenage re-reads—the First Sea Lord pretending he didn’t recognise Hannay. She was about to remark on Mrs Harman’s odd behaviour when she realised that her mother had perceived nothing untoward, and signalled to the waiter instead. 

Back in her flat, over a second glass of Chablis—in a reckless unbirthday spirit, she’d opened a decent bottle she’d been saving—it occurred to her what had happened: though her mother and Jane Harman, Principal Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary for the Department of Administrative Affairs, had known each other for some years, the acquaintance was fairly slight. Mrs Harman probably thought of Mummy as Evelyn Grayling, and had only remembered her first husband’s surname, connecting it with a tomboyish diminutive of Matilda to produce an increasingly frequent _Chronicle_ byline, when it was almost too late. 

Drugs. Joyriding. No reason why an MP’s son shouldn’t dabble in either, and be reasonably confident of police discretion if things went tits-up, but _shabby and abortive attempt to cheat on a Maths O-level_ was a curiously tame addition to the criminal profile. Hang on, though, that was getting ahead of herself. All she knew about for definite was this prang, back in the spring. Half-term, Mrs Harman had said; that would give a date to within a week, probably sometime in March. If the accident had happened in or around Merrick’s constituency—and Parliament had been dissolved for the General Election by then—it would probably be pretty easy to pin it down. She topped up her drink. 

Forty-eight hours, innumerable phone calls, some archival rooting and a conversation with one of her more disagreeably alcoholic and lecherous colleagues later, Mattie had a small heap of suggestive information. There had been a crash that fitted the description: right week of the year, within spitting distance of Anthony Merrick’s constituency home, connected with drug-trafficking; more than drugs, in fact— _murder_. She remembered the case now; it was one of those that had been written up in the national dailies as farce: a fairly small-time Kuwaiti or Bahraini or Omani (all the sources differed) goon, using the name of a well-known conductor as his alias, had made an unlikely partnership with a pigeon-fancying spinster from an old County family. She ran a sort of halfway house for delinquents; he planted his son among them, and they used her homing pigeons to import cocaine. One did actually hear of barmier schemes, or just as barmy: it was lucky for the authorities that the ingenuity of drug-smugglers seemed frequently to outstrip good sense or self-preservatory instinct by a considerable margin. Mattie wondered if it could even be made to pay: a pigeon might be able to carry about an ounce of uncut coke, but it only took one to be shot, fall victim to a bird of prey or otherwise fall out of the sky for the whole operation to be blown. But before that could happen, apparently, the boys had a falling out, the gang leader stabbed his rival, hot-wired his employer’s geriatric Rolls and set off on a crazy tour of the countryside. He must have been high as a kite, because when he finally crashed the car he was heading back towards the scene of the crime. He was killed, the other members of the gang and the pigeon lady were picked up by the coppers after the body was reported, and the Omani or Bahraini or Kuwaiti goon had escaped God knows where. 

There were some tantalising details: the murder weapon hadn’t been found (but the gang leader might have taken it with him, just one more piece of twisted metal in the wreckage); what she could gather about the victim’s injuries seemed inconsistent with a flick-knife fight (but a freak incident could easily turn GBH into murder); the son and daughter of Mr Merrick’s neighbours, who were both close to Patrick in age, had been harassed by the gang on the afternoon of the murder (but the youths had been making a nuisance of themselves for months); a police alert issued after the murderer went on the run said he might have been accompanied by another lad (but almost everything about that broadcast had been inaccurate); all the defendants had pleaded guilty (but they were up to their necks). There was nothing substantial to connect Patrick Merrick with any of it. All smoke without fire, which _was_ a metaphorical possibility, if not a literal one. And yet—Mattie was the first to admit she was the flubsiest of cub reporters, but even to her inexperienced eye, this glowed with newly-applied whitewash. If she could just persuade her chief to let her go down there, sniff about a bit, talk to that priest—Father Hunt—who she suspected knew more than he was willing to say on the phone, pump a few of the locals—perhaps the undertaker who'd dealt with the body might let something slip. She suspected it would be a hard sell, but—she looked at the wall-clock—if she caught the chief in Pomeroy’s now, he’d probably still be at the stage of well-oiled susceptibility to flirtation and flattery, which, she knew well, could turn on a sixpence to pig-headed, boorish intransigence. She cleared the gubbins off her desk into her tote-bag, grabbed her coat from the rack, and ran for it. 

He wasn’t there. 

‘Damn, sod, bollocks and fucking hell.’ She banged the bar with the heel of her hand. 

‘Bad day?’ asked the barman. ‘Can I get you something for it?’ 

‘Glass of your finest Chateau Fleet Street, please, Charlie. Sorry. I was hoping to catch hold of someone.’ 

‘Mm. Know the feeling.’ The commiseration was heartfelt, and though he was smiling, his—very attractive, if you liked the puppyish type, which Mattie didn’t—dark brown eyes were genuinely morose. He handed her the glass of claret. ‘One ten, please.’ 

‘Thought you looked a bit low. Anything you can talk about?’ 

‘Ah, it’s just me bird, like.’ Charlie’s spasmodic romance with an enigmatic _au pair_ provided a reliable fund of good-natured persiflage for the regulars. ‘She’s going back to France in a couple of days. I wanted to try and make a go of it, long-distance—’ 

‘Tricky—’ 

‘—but she says surely we are not so _serieux_? Well, I had to put a brave face on it then, so I say, well, how about a night over at mine before you go, last hurrah, like? But her host family wouldn’t stand for that, they’re R.C.s, and bloody stiff-necked with it. Dunno why I bother, sometimes. Too soft by half. Anyway,’ he said, brightening, ‘I get off in a quarter of an hour, and she’s coming down here for a drink. I suppose we'll go to the cinema then or something. _Diabolical_ taste in films, she has, mind you.’ 

‘You don’t say? Well, I was going to dash and if I could run my man to ground in the Blue Stilton, but I’ve got to stick around for this—’ 

‘Ah, leave it out.’ 

‘A sighting of the demmed elusive Claudie in the wild? I wouldn’t miss it for the world…’

**Author's Note:**

> Extreme handwavium has been employed to get personnel roughly in the right place at the right time (and also in a feeble attempt to conceal my thoroughgoing ignorance about investigative journalism in the pre-internet era) but if you not only prefer but insist on accuracy, this is set very roughly on the _Run Away Home_ timeline.
> 
> Thanks to AJHall for the idea of writing this one from the journalist's point of view.


End file.
